INSTEAD OF VIEWING DONALD Trump’s daily barrage of fantasies and lies about COVID-19 as unprecedented and shocking, we should perhaps see it simply as business as usual. Ignore it, cover it up, and wish it away. While hundreds of thousands suffer and die. It’s all too familiar.
The Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan—who was president from the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic through its horrifying, unchecked spread— notoriously failed to even utter the word AIDS in public until 1987. And before he finally deigned to mention it, and no doubt after as well, the disease was treated around his West Wing as a hilarious fag joke.
Social distancing in my apartment during today’s terrifying pandemic has given me time to reflect on the early days of queer liberation and that other pandemic. In particular, I have thought about how, when celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall in June 2019, we committed a grave error by not making the HIV/ AIDS crisis a central feature of our recollections.